I love writing about music. Even more, however, I love listening to music. From Rossini's "Il Barbiere di Siviglia" to Aqua's "Barbie Girl" (which is easily one of my favorite "guilty pleasure" songs) to Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals and a little bit of everything else inbetween. Except rap. I have to say, no matter how much I try to appreciate it, I just don't. It isn't music. There isn't something I can sing along with or harmonize with. I just have to take a pass on it. Everything else, though, I will usually find something that I like.

The guilty pleasure/pure cheese songs are so much fun! Just about anything from "Glee" is awesome. I love Forbidden Broadway, too. "Wickeder" cracks me up, but so do most of the Forbidden Broadway songs. Some songs are just perfect for singing and dancing around with a hairbrush...like O-Zone's "Dragostea Din Tei" and if you're the "Numa Numa boy" they might even make you famous-ish. I could dance around singing Kris Phillips (Fei Xiang)'s song "For You Only" for hours. His song "Love Me", too if I knew all of the words. Sucks that I don't know enough Mandarin, though.

I have so many that I love putting on and cheesing out to. Not all of them are cheesy, it's more likely that I was doing something cheesy when I heard the song and that is a memory associated with it now. For example, Asia's "Heat of the Moment" isn't pure cheese on its own, but the first time I heard it I was 16, working at McDonald's, and back doing dishes in "the dives", having water fights with a co-worker and I loved it. Or, years later, discovering that the same co-worker was roommates with my (at the time) future husband and sitting in their dining room with White Town's "Your Woman" looped on repeat. For years I had trouble remembering the name of that group and the album and song name so I just called it "The Star Wars Song" because of the music that the song opens with.

Random others that are just fun to listen to in my list are: Dexy's Midnight Runners/Save Ferris "Come on Eileen". I love both versions. Same with Cheap Trick/Save Ferris versions of "I Want You To Want Me". Both are great. I love Hot Chocolate's "You Sexy Thing" and The Cars song "My Best Friend's Girl". I can totally rock out to Rockapella's "Zombie Jamboree" or "Where In The World Is Carmen San Diego?"

There are others that I love that I can only listen to when my kid isn't around. They are certainly not "Quin Appropriate" songs. Unfortunately, those few are some of the most very favorite songs on my list. Ugh!!

Off to cheese out to some of the more not kid friendly songs for a bit. I am kidless for a few days and loving that I can listen to anything that I want!

Take care,
Cindi

Attention All Villages

Call your idiots. They're missing. I know where they are, too. At whatever restaurant I am eating in.

When I go out to eat, which happens rarely enough that it is a treat, I don't want to be seated next to the village idiot. Unfortunately, that happened the last time I went out to a "nice" restaurant. I'm not talking about kids being loud, either. Ya know what? It happens. I've got one, I know how they get sometimes. I mean those people who really should know better, but act as if they don't.

We had two different tables of them.

The first group was the one that kept sending all of their food back. Each person at the table sent their food back to the kitchen. This is a nice restaurant and their chef is damn near amazing. I have a hard time believing that every person at the table had gotten bad food. Then again, it isn't completely impossible, so send it back once and it's all good, right? Wrong. These people took a handful of bites and sent it back again. So, with far more patience than I would have displayed, the chef cooks a new meal for them and they try again. Third set of meals. Three of the people at the table quiet down to grumbles and the fourth of the group takes some bites and starts the cycle again. Bitch finally gets her meal and eats. And the angels sang.

The whole time I am watching this process, the group was rather loudly complaining "amongst themselves" about how bad their food was and how irritated they were. Like I said, the chef at this place is wonderful and I have never once ever gotten a single bit of food there that was less than amazing and I am a phenomenally picky eater and not so easy to please. I'll be the first one to send food back if it is legitimately not right. Four tries before it was corrected, though? Not buying it. This particular group was trying to not buy it, too. Their meals, anyway. I don't know the outcome of that, but it looked from my seat that they just wanted to eat at a wonderful restaurant for free. They were just irritating, however.

The other table was the "we're getting toasty, look how much FUN we're having" group. Look, I love a good glass of merlot (Echelon, in particular) as much as the next girl, but I don't do it at the top of my lungs. I talk nicely, using my "inside voice". I am all up for having a good time and enjoying a night out, but you have to be able to judge your environment and determine if you are behaving appropriately to the location. These people were partying like they were at a pub and doing so in a restaurant that sells bottles of wines that cost in the multiple hundreds of dollars range. We were not at Denny's at midnight. The more they drank, the louder they got. It wasn't just that they were chit-chatting. It was the annoyingly artificial "look at MEEEEEE" shrill laugh that the woman was doing that was grating.

Dude, I was looking, and frankly, you weren't having nearly as much fun as I was. Quin and I were trading bites of dinner and dessert and being silly. We have fun together and this was no exception. We were having fun quietly, though. With inside voices. No making a spectacle and causing a scene, just enjoying our family night out.

So, as I get ready for another outing at another restaurant tomorrow, I just want to request that all villages call your idiots now. I don't want to sit next to them.

Take care,
Cindi

Facts are fun!

I have to point out that I have no business being the spelling/grammar police for anyone for the most part. I have my foes...commas and that whole who/whom thing being the big ones. I always forget which words you are supposed to not end your sentences with, too. I even start sentences with "but" and "and" knowing that I shouldn't. (Though, really, that is more in spoken conversation than written.) Still, despite all that, even I know that there are some things that are just better being avoided.

If you are going to be on a forum posting your opinion all over, please, for the love of all things chocolate, understand that you DO NOT have absolute, unfettered freedom of speech. Typing "in my opinion" or "just my opinion" doesn't automatically grant you open season to post any stupid thing you want with freedom from consequences. Look at it like visiting a house. The owner of the house can kick you out at any time, right? So, if you start running your yap and offend the homeowner, said homeowner can tell you to take a hike. (Unless you are in California and have to abide by the "Pruneyard doctrine", then you actually do have to put up with trespassers on your own property if they start talking political speech it looks like.) You go ahead and call the cops and say that you got kicked out for stating "just my opinion" and they'll tell you "Too bad, the person who owns the house can kick out any unwanted persons that they choose to kick out." You don't have to like it, you just have to accept it.

Forums are the same concept. You are there at the generosity of the person paying the bills and they get to make the rules. Obviously there are laws and court cases and fun stuff like that which could change the specifics, depending on the location, but in general, you are only at a private forum by the good will of the owner. So typing out "But I have freedom of speech" in all caps and screaming about your right to it when it comes to privately owned forums is just not completely true.

This goes for libel, too. You can say that something is "just my opinion" and in general, it is a pretty good CYA statement. Libel also has court cases that say that "JMO" has limits, so some thought before you type is always wise. While there is currently debate in regard to forum posting and some internet related content and definition, in general, if it is spoken it is slander and if it is written (typed, posted...) it is libel. These words are not interchangeable at your whim. On top of that, I did spell it correctly. LIBEL. Not liable, as I so often see, but libel. Really.

My next peeve is one that I am a culprit of myself. Punctuation and paragraphs and looooong sentences. Look, I can craft a run on sentence that goes for damn near forever, makes sense, and is spelled correctly. The problem is, it gets hard to keep your focus on them if they run too long. I have to remind myself of this. A lot. I do it because I know how hard it can be to follow along with someone who is on word 275 of a single sentence and I try to not be that someone writing 300 word sentences. Anyone reading your thoughts will appreciate your sentences staying shorter. I know. They've told me.

The next part of that is punctuation. It is vital. A lack of punctuation is almost physically painful to try to read. It makes figuring out what you are trying to say a lot harder, too. I swear, if you go ahead an give it a try, you might get some in the wrong places sometimes, but it will sure be better than just not using any at all. I can't even be bothered with reading someone's words if they can't be bothered enough to toss in the random comma or period to help me out.

Paragraphs are the third part of this. They, like punctuation, are your friends. Nobody wants to read an unbroken wall of text. My paragraphs can get long, especially with my penchant for long sentences, but I mean that big 8 x 10 notebook page size block. It usually doesn't contain much punctuation, either. I can't get past a few lines before I am forced to give up trying or I find myself with a headache and frustrated. Hitting the enter key and throwing a bit of spacing into your posts won't kill you. The wall of text is bad and nearly guarantees that not many will read your words.

Not a single button on your keyboard will bite you if you use it. Though, in some cases, they probably should.

A lot of the rest of the peeves are more spelling things that I see frequently. Things that are maybe not as common as the last words I wrote about, but common enough that I see them a lot. People using big words that they don't know how to spell correctly (or even what they mean, for that matter) to try to be better than the next poster just confuse me. Why do that? Is Dictionary.com really that hard to find? If you don't know how to spell a word, look it up! Heck, most browsers will even tell you that your spelling is off and offer suggestions to fix it. If you don't know what the big word means that you are using, please don't use it. Or, again, look it up first.

I have seen this "word" used frequently, by people claiming to be adults, and I can only shake my fist and wonder at how public education is failing so badly. Tooken. It got tooken. Come on!! This is pretty basic, right? How do you not know that it is taken that you are looking for?

Another that is similar is seeing people use "it's a mute point" all over the place. No, it isn't. It might be a moot point, but it isn't a mute one.

This isn't a spelling thing, but it bothers me. If you "could care less" you still care too much. You are trying to say that you could not care less, because you already care as little as it is possible to care.

The last one (for now) is one that is in dispute. It has gotten so widely used that the meaning is changing and the original meaning seems to be falling by the wayside. To decimate something. Sure, NOW it is understood to mean that the thing was annihilated completely. I know what is meant when I hear it, but I know that it used to mean to destroy a tenth of something, not the entire thing. Not a huge peeve, but one of those things that I notice, even if no one else does.

I have a whole list of logical fallacies that I am working on next.

Dun u no wat i meen?

Why is there such a big problem with homophones? This is such a pet peeve of mine. I really try to avoid being the spelling/grammar police because I have my own bits of grammar that I always seem to trip over and get wrong. My biggest nemesis is figuring out when to use "who" as opposed to "whom". I mess this one up a lot. I'm bad with commas sometimes, too. I throw them in where it sounds right to me. Obviously this isn't the best way to figure out the proper placements for them. I even end my sentences badly sometimes. Knowing this, though, means that I usually try to be more forgiving of the mistakes of others. The homophones won't ever not bother me, though.

Really, how basic is it to differentiate between to/too/two or your/you're? Their/there/they're is another common irritant. I also see do/due, are/our, fare/fair, site/sight, through/threw, and here/hear. How about won/one, no/know, or wood/would for mixed up uses? I see all of these on such a regular basis and I wonder if this just wasn't covered in school for some people or if it is an issue of being too lazy (see, correct usage) to bother. WHY?! Holy Christ on a cracker! These are REALLY simple words. How is it so easy for some people to abuse them and either not notice or not care?

Once upon a time, many moons ago, I had my own forum. It amused me to go back over the rules that I had written up (with bits and pieces that had been adopted and adapted from another forum, the owner of which was wonderful enough to give me his permission to use) and so I decided to share bits of them and show you how absolutely anal I could be as a forum owner!

Rules:
"We have intelligent members. We will not allow posting habits that lower the collective IQ of our forums. For example, if you start a new thread, make sure that you put some thought into it.

Use proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling. We don't require perfection, but give it a try. Your fellow members will thank you for it. And AOL/l337 speak is NOT proper or acceptable diction. We are adults here. do not tyep like this kthx? u talk like ths lol no1 understaends what ur saying and ur not liekd. lol interwebz."

I have seen some others recently that are starting to bother me just as much as the homophones and homonyms. The almost constant usage of "wat/wot" for "what" and "dun" for "don't", "sum" for "some" and "U" for "you". In one particular paragraph that I read I think I actually whimpered out loud. I don't remember the sentiment of the post, but it looked like this: "plzz ppl sum wons stupid i no wat u r talkin about their dum hear well give u are stuff too look at". Honest to God, it was this bad. For the love of all things chocolate! Would it really kill you to use a little bit of punctuation and spellcheck there? Some of these posts come from people claiming to be in college. I want to know just what college is admitting people with writing skills like the above shown example. That was one that came from a person claiming to be a college student.

Like I said, I have my own shortcomings when it comes to writing, so I try to avoid policing other people, but if your posts are causing other people physical pain, you're doing it wrong. My moron threshold gets lower and lower every day.

Take care,
Cindi